Thanks to Jason Calacanis, another example of this phenomenon, for the pointer. He adds:

"Frankly, I couldn't run a business any other way. The only way to really get things done is to be out there. There is so much noise in the space, so little attention, that your best bet for building great products is being totally honest about what you're doing and letting folks help you."

Direct marketing guru, Jay Abraham, taught me to share my knowledge as much as possible. His theory is that people will assume you know even more than you're sharing. Tim Sanders (formerly of Yahoo) wrote a good book, "Love is the Killer App: how to win business and influence friends,". His core recommendation is to give knowledge to people you meet in business - try to help people with information - and you will differentiate yourself and build your personal brand. It works.

Funny how this "share information, help business partners, etc." line of thought show up in every Multi-level Marketing organization. :)
Honesty is the best lie they say - or watch my hands, I am cheating as the stage-magicians say :)

Nonetheless, I too believe that honesty and being open and transparent can help - unless half of your business partners and co-workers use it to stab you in the back.

In terms of "sensitive information" I've found that for every piece of data you put out there you get at least five in return. When I started publishing our Google Adsense data at Weblogs, Inc. the information might have helped Nick Denton/Gawker Media/other blog competitors on some level, but I was helped 10x more by the private emails/IMs I got with techniques on how to improve them.

If you are a confident and capable competitor you don't mind putting your data out there because you know you can out-execute the competition. We didn't dominate Nick Denton's blogs because of some inside information--we crushed our #2 competitor because of execution.

You can do a million things in the locker room to prepare for the game, but at the end of the day this is like the NBA in that the players who play the hardest and smartest ON THE COURT win.

FREE was available in all digital forms--ebook, web book, and audiobook--for free shortly after the hardcover was published on July 7th. The ebook and web book were free for a limited time and limited to certain geographic regions as determined by each national publisher; the unabridged MP3 audiobook (get zip file here) will remain free forever, available in all regions.